iirc isnt Darkest Dungeons inspired by Ravenloft and Strahd fuckery? i always did get DND vibes from it
also i love how over-the-top tryhard paimon's backstory is lol; i wonder if it and the other Paimon have fought before
i think i might just refluff rapiers to be armblades that can be still disarmed, since theyre not exactly a deadly dancer but take after the archetype
pushdagger seems interesting and since im going to go more into PF 1/2 i wonder if it's there
i may be dead inside but at least i have Mystery :,)
Darkest Dungeon is like the love-child of Warhammer Fantasy, Diablo and Lovecraft's writing, but there is enough applicability with all types of horror and Dark Fantasy games, so any similarities to Ravenloft are fitting.
Which Bane though, as D&D has two versions of him: the one from the Forgotten Realms, and the one from Nentir Vale/4th Edition.
I don't remember FR Bane ever wearing a mask, especially since he was the warrior-type of the Dead Three. Indeed his depiction in the 3rd Edition Faiths and Pantheons was a buff and bald dude with a gauntlet.
I missed out entirely on 4th Edition, so I can't say much about Bane from there, aside from the fact that he wasn't a god of Tyranny per se, he was primarily a god of War.
So how successful has the merchant tactics of the Red Wizards of Thay been?
The one where they sell magical items to other countries and subsequently become too valuable as a country to really move against?
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"The one where they sell magical items to other countries and subsequently become too valuable as a country to really move against?
I think it was, "incredibly successful and increasing Thayan soft power considerably. Then completely lost when Szass Tam turned it into a necrocracy and all trade stopped like North Korea."
Basically, Szass Tam went, "I don't WANT us to be integral to the world via economics! I want to be integral to the world because I killed everyone and control their corpses!"
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 6th 2023 at 10:01:20 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I thought it happened after Szass turned everyone there into his undead slaves.
Like there's a Red Wizard merchant in Neverwinter Nights, and he's all " My bretheren are fools. Why waste time with pointless supervillain schemes that piss people off when we can just sell them things to make a profit AND soft power."
Like I'm thinking of a merchant Warlock character and I think something like this would be neat to play as.
The type of Lawful Evil character the party needs to do the dirty work and relies on as a result.
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"This makes me teary eyed. I actually get to use my expansive knowledge and hundreds of dollars of game books. [sniff]
No, the Thayans' entry into large scale merchantalism, establishment of embassies, and reproachment with non-Agarlarond nations happened in Third Edition. In First and Second Editions, they were just Stygia (Conan the Barbarian) being a bunch of Egyptian sorcerers ruling over the enslaved populace.
In Third edition, they started the whole sale of magic and Bothering by the Book Loophole Abuse by keeping their slaves inside their compounds as well as being too useful to kill or drive away. This was notably criticized by some FR fans (okay, just me) because it was actually the Zhentarim's entire thing but the Zhentarim had been treated as Keystone Cops for a decade.
FOURTH Edition wanted to establish more "Lord of the Rings" stuff by Hasbro so they turned Obould's Kingdom of Many arrows into a bunch of CE monsters again and then had Thay become Mordor with the undead. Szass Tam was thus reduced to something of a stereotypical one note Dark Lord in the process (but he was never very far from that anyway so it's a bit of a lateral move).
Presumably there's still holdouts of Thayan Enclaves but, well, it's hard to argue for them when there's a Lich King.
Fifth Edition has the Zhentarim back in their role as PC friendly merchants. At some point, they drove off Manshoon and Fzoul Chembryl so the new Zhentarim are now still evil wizards and monsters and mercenaries but they're Only in It for the Money. Ironically, this attitude has allowed them to rebuild all their past influence.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 8th 2023 at 1:41:17 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.So, one of the things I do in my homebrew is abuse the hell out of "spacial folds". In effect, much of the topography of the world is twisted up by folds and compressions in space. Some areas are far larger than the space they take up in the map, things like forests being the biggest offenders. There are mountains that became taller as you approach the base.
But most importantly, there are places you cannot approach at a straight line. If a map says, twenty miles north-by-north-east, six miles north-west and 200 yards due south, then you can't plot from the beginning point and just draw a straight line to it. You have to follow the path exactly because whatever you're looking for exists at the end of a tunnel in space and if you step off the path the path disappears.
That's really neat! It reminds me of the Demon: The Fallen game. Before the fall the devils (I think) were tasked with connecting the places of creation, so lets say another angel makes a beautiful lake, the devil does the work of creating the paths that lead to it.
During the war of the fall, they used their power to literally sever rebel cities from the physical plane. You can still see it, but if you walk on a bridge to the city, you come out turned around. This way the created secret paths into and out of strongholds, or to create passages into loyalist strongholds.
![]()
Think of it like a video game developer coding that Room A connects to Room B through the respective east-west doors. In this case, the world actually has them connect through the north door in room A, and east on room B. Edit: And to get back, there's Room C that you have to go through. Secret location discovered!
Edited by Earnest on Apr 15th 2023 at 11:13:56 AM
![]()
Sorry about that. It's just that I recently got through playing SIGNALIS, and the next-to-final dungeon does that a lot as part of intentional mind screw when you enter the Dark World. I had to draw a map for it, and it ended up looking like a trippy spaghetti drawing with how the rooms connected.
More head-smoke non-Euclidian stuff inside:All of the game up to that point is normal isometric perspective and orientation, then it suddenly plays with these relations, even having a weird "ladder" that goes down, but it returns you to the same floor in a different room further south.
To get on topic, after watching the D&D movie I ended up with a question about The Red Wizards of Thay. They all seem to have these distinctive tattoos, and Sophina hides theirs under a head cover or cowl. As an undercover agent, and one who seems to use the Disguise Self spell to switch from normal drab blue clothes to the red wizard one at the drop of a hat, why didn't or wouldn't they hide those tattoos? One would think it'd add a layer of protection against either an accidental or malicious actor pulling her head covering off.
Is it a cultural thing, or are the tattoos magical and they can't be hidden? Since they might be undead or even a lich, I can understand that growing her hair out to further hide their true identity is probably complicated, but then there's these mundane things called wigs.
Am I overthinking things in a Fridge Logic way, or is there a canon explanation?
On an unrelated note, what all would you say did she use to detect a wildshaped druid in her vicinity?
Edited by Earnest on Apr 15th 2023 at 8:00:13 AM
The space-folds thing exists as an excuse for a couple things:
1. To justify that stock bit trope about maps that gives very precise, and very nonsensical, instructions
2. To justify the far more important trope of there possibly being hidden secrets around every corner. Why hasn't anyone discovered X in Y hundred years? Because you needed to take a left and then three rights after Albuquerque, precisely.
![]()
![]()
re: Red Wizards. The baldness and tattoos were definitely their thing, especially in 3rd edition, which highlighted how Thayd, the first Red Wizard, was ethnically Mulan (Egyptian to us) to begin with, and still had carried-over cultural proclivities.
Funnily enough I don't *think* they were like this in the novels that introduced them (specifically as the badguys that the Simbul opposed). And this was decades before 3.5 turned them into Magical Wal-Mart.
Edited by MyssaRei on Apr 17th 2023 at 7:45:59 AM
If you were picky, then yeah, Mulhorand = Egypt and Unther = Sumer, primarily because the Imaskari literally yoinked people FROM Earth to bring in as slave labor in the Realms.
Thay wasn't really supposed to directly refer to anything baring how it was an EVIL magocracy that started out as a mage-led rebellion against a primarily priest-led society (the Mulan/Mulhorand empire).
The fact that Thayd was a jerk was just cherry that topped the proverbial Thayan cake.

Paimon's Deadly Dancers remind me of the Harlequins in Warhammer 40K, while Paimon himself seems very similar to the Jester in Darkest Dungeon.